1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for preparing a computed profile database in which a correlation among sequences of a plurality of biopolymers is analyzed and the results thereof are accumulated therein, and a method for preparing a correlation diagram or a multiple alignment of sequences at a high speed utilizing the profile database.
2. Prior Art
A conventional method for analyzing the correlation among sequences includes ClustalW (1994-), which is a program prepared by J. Thompson and T. Gibson. A computational method used therein is described in ClustalW (Thompson J. D., Higgins D. G., Gibson T. J., Nucleic Acid Res. 1994, November: 4673-80). Use of ClustalW enables analysis of the correlation of evolutionary systems among different sequences and the preparation of multiple alignments thereof.
The conventional technique, however, has the following drawbacks.                1. In general, an enormously long computation time is necessary in the analysis of the correlation among a large number of sequences. For example, when analysis is performed on 500 nucleic acid sequences having an average sequence length of 1,500 bp using ClustalW, the computation may take about 30 hours. Nowadays, since the sequences of biopolymers such as nucleic acids and amino acids (hereinafter simply referred to as “sequence”) are easily decoded and sequence data is mass-produced, such time-consuming analysis of the sequences represents a bottleneck in the advancement of research (a computation time drawback).        2. As the size and number of sequences to be computed increase, in addition to the computation time, the necessary amount of computer memory space is also increased and the computer specifications necessary to complete the computation within a realistic time also become large. However, there are few academic research environments in which such a computer can be used (a computation scale drawback).        3. Although a large amount of computing resources and research time are consumed in individual computations, the reutilization of computation results is not considered (a computation results reutilization drawback).        
The object of the present invention is to provide a means for solving the drawbacks of the conventional technique.